Monday, November 28, 2016

While
at the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast, I spied a doll in a glass case behind
the cash register in the gift shop. Turns out it was a Frozen Charlotte doll
that had been found in a privy excavation along with other shattered bits of
crockery and bottles. An employee kindly took it off the wall so I could look
at it more closely. Conjecture of course has it as Lizzie Borden's doll since
she was the only child living there around the time the dolls were manufactured
(1850-1920 or thereabouts).

Item reflected in her glass case: a hatchet windchime with blood "droplets"
(hanging upside down in this view)

Lizzie
was born in 1860 and moved to the Second Street house in 1872 when she was 12.
Is it possible the doll was given her when she was younger, moved with her to
the house, and was discarded in the privy after the arms and one leg were broken? It is
entirely possible Lizzie (or even her sister Emma) kept the doll well past the
age one would play with a doll, because of its sentimental value. It may have
been a gift from their birth mother Sarah Morse. Sarah died when Lizzie was 3
and Emma 12. In that circumstance, however, you would think you would keep the
doll even in its broken state. It's hard to know what the story behind this
enigmatic piece is.

A
quick bit of online research reveals that the bisque dolls were called Frozen
Charlottes because they were frozen in one piece, without moveable limbs. No
fun to dress them! Apparently they became allied with a sad poem and then
ballad from the era, "A Corpse Going to a Ball," by Seba Smith. Among
other things, Smith coined the word "scrumptious" and wrote the
terrible saying, "There's more than one way to skin a cat."

Exhibit of items taken from the privy excavation

No
surprise, then, that he wrote a poem based on the true 1840 story of a young
woman riding to a New Year's Eve ball in an open sleigh, who didn't want to
cover her beautiful dress. At first Charlotte complains to her husband about
the cold, then later she talks of growing warmer. After ten miles of shivering,
she died of hypothermia.

Here's
a few stanzas from the poem:

...Her bonnet and her gloves were on,
she stepped into the sleigh,
Rode swiftly down the mountainside
and o'er the hills away;
With muffled face and silent lips,
five miles at length were passed,
When Charles with few and shivering words,
the silence broke at last.

"Such a dreadful night I never saw,
the reins I scarce can hold."
Fair Charlotte shivering faintly said,
"I am exceeding cold."
He cracked his whip, he urged his steed
much faster than before,
And thus five other dreary miles
in silence were passed o'er.

Said Charles, "How fast the shivering ice
is gathering on my brow."
And Charlotte still more faintly said,
"I'm growing warmer now."
So on they rode through frosty air
and glittering cold starlight,
Until at last the village lamps
and the ballroom came in sight...

What a great toy for a kid! A woman frozen for her vanity.

Wish I knew more about this striking image I found online

Kind of a new twist on "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."

You can still purchase these dolls on ebay or maybe find some buried in your backyard. One more fun element about the dolls; some of them have unglazed backs so that they can float in the bathtub. Apparently people sometimes baked the smaller ones into cakes. Yum, tasty corpse in my red velvet slice! And, true to Victorian sensibilities, some came with their own coffin.

Monday, November 14, 2016

Abby
Borden, Lizzie's stepmother, was 64 at the time of her murder. She was
5'3" and weighed 180. The autopsy record describes her as "very well
nourished and very fleshy." It seems like adding insult to injury to
chastise her for her weight, but that is what some chroniclers have done.

Abby Durfee Borden

Despite
this, I enjoyed one of the iconic nonfiction books about the Lizzie Borden
case, Victoria Lincoln's A Private Disgrace, which won an Edgar award in
1967. The author was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1904, twelve years
after the murders took place in 1892. She knew the elderly Lizzie Borden as a
several-streets-over neighbor but admits she had initially remembered her as
living right next door.

The fan is a hatchet: clever book design

The
book is confusing at times, with vague pronoun usage and a somewhat meandering
through-line, but two things mark it as special:

1.
Thanks to her banker grandfather, Lincoln has a piece of insider information
that she feels explains the murders: Andrew Borden (Lizzie's father) was
planning to transfer a beloved bit of seaside property to Lizzie's stepmother
Abby, and Lizzie found out. It helps to know that an earlier and similar deed
transfer of a house on Ferry Street took place to assist Abby's impoverished
sister. Lizzie and her sister Emma were enraged for some reason, and at that
point Lizzie ceased calling Abby "mother" as she had done since she
was a toddler and her widowed father remarried. Lincoln thinks Lizzie got wind
of the idea (literally on the wind: she believes Lizzie in her second
story bedroom heard murmurings from the open windows of the sitting room below)
and resolved she would prevent its happening. Lincoln thinks Lizzie only meant
to kill Abby, but Andrew came home too early for her to figure out what to do
with Abby's body.

2.
Lincoln thinks Lizzie did the killings in an epileptic fugue state.

It's
well worth a read, but what befouls the book for me is Lincoln's disparaging
remarks about Abby's weight.

Another cover I saw online: interesting claw hand

The
poor woman took 19 blows directly to her head and neck (not the 40 whacks of
the jump-rope rhyme, but still a wretched volume that implies great rage on the
part of the perpetrator)...and she's still getting hit. Lincoln cannot seem to
describe Abby's walking as anything other than "waddling." Throughout
the book, she scorns Abby's weight. Here are a few passages:

"The
day is hot; the calico is damp and crumpled with the sweat of her 80 excess
pounds of fat, and her pale face shines with it."

"At
the inquest, Lizzie claimed that Abby waddled almost daily to market."
(Lincoln argues that Abby was basically housebound, and Emma or Bridget did the
marketing).

"She
only wanted peace and quiet in which to eat her way on through her living
death."

Not
considering it enough to cast aspersions on her weight, Lincoln attacks her cleanliness too:

"Abby,
enclosed in fat and self pity, was the kind who make indifferent housekeepers
in any part of the world."

Lincoln
even blames Andrew's murder on Abby's weight!

"The
problem was, in essence, Abby's fat; if she had weighed 30 or 40 pounds less,
Andrew Borden might well have died in his bed."

I
read once that making fun of fat people is the last standing
societally-acceptable cruelty. The Polack jokes from my childhood have
vanished, but not acceptance of the lyrics from a polka I remember from then:
"you can have her, I don't want her, she's too fat for me."

Another clever design: Lizzie is the murder weapon

Abby's
post-mortem indignities continued: the contents of her stomach were compared to
her husband's, a slim and reedy man.

Moreover,
and sadly, the crime scene photos can be easily seen online. I won't link to
them here, but you can google them. Andrew, thin, reclines on his lounge, his
head destroyed, while Abby lies face down on the floor, a large woman felled by
her assassin. I have spent a lot of time studying the pitiful sight of her
upturned shoe soles with their humbled nails. I can only hope she rests in
peace.

Abby Durfee Borden

After
a handful of Lizzie Borden posts (and many more to come!), I'm happy to
announce there's a reason behind them. My novel The Murderer's Maid has
been picked up by Yellow Pear Press and will launch in October 2017. There is a
big coincidence with the press's name: pears feature prominently in the Lizzie
Borden lore—she claimed to be eating pears in a hot barn loft while one of the
murders was taking place in the house. It's kismet that the press's name and
the novel match up.

I'll
update here as news progresses, including a cover reveal in a few months.

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About Me

I write historical novels. The Witch's Trinity is about medieval witchcraft, Woman of Ill Fame is about a Gold Rush prostitute, and House of Bellaver is about a haunted 1800s house museum. The Murderer's Maid: a Lizzie Borden Novel tells the American legend from the point of view of the maid Bridget Sullivan.
I'm fascinated by a lot of stuff and blog about it: history, road trips, suffrage, museums, the Gold Rush, witchcraft, murder, Victorians, cursed Egyptian tombs.